The federal government wants kindergartners
to learn Mandarin. To accomplish this, it has given Walnut Valley
Unified a $1.2 million Foreign Language Assistance Program grant.

“The government saw a need for more language instruction,
especially in critical languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian,
Japanese and Korean,” Walnut program specialist Jenny Kwan-Hata said.
“So it decided to give school districts money to develop new language
programs.”

Walnut Valley calls its new program “Global Connections –
Creating 21st Century Biliterate/Bicultural Children.” The program’s
goal is to make students fluent in both English and Mandarin by the end
of the fifth-grade.

Walnut Valley Unified was the only school district in the area to break the 900 mark in the 2011 API scores released on Wednesday. It rose five points from 898 to 503.

State Superintendent of Public Education Tom
Torlakson announced that 49 percent of California’s public
schools now meet or exceed their Academic Performance Index (API)
targets, a number representing a 3-point increase over last year. The
2011 API scores for schools and districts across the state were released
Wednesday.

But at the same time, 913 additional schools in the state are
threatened with being labeled as failures for not meeting federal NCLB
standards, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).